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This is quite interesting, and it would be good to see the EA community look more at stories like this. A few thoughts:
1) I think praise for neoliberalism’s success should be tempered a bit—while neoliberalism updated classical liberalism, it was still rooted in classical liberalism, which is pretty baked into the Constitution and founding ideals of the U.S. (and has a major influence in Anglo-American culture). Neoliberalism has not gained nearly as much traction in Europe, where socialism or socialism lite continued to largely dominate until a recent, distinctly illiberal ideology has started to fester (e.g. Le Pen).
2) I think EAs actually engage in remarkably utopian thinking, especially relative to a few years ago when much of EA was focused on global poverty and very short-term interventions. EAs spend a lot of time focusing on avoiding “dystopia” (e.g. https://foundational-research.org/), but the focus on avoiding dystopia of orgs like FRI and FHI seems to often get into utopian areas. Still, maybe framing things differently and talking more about the positive might help.
3) Neoliberalism had the advantage, especially later in the game, of wealthy backers (like Antony Fisher). That may have enabled more money-intensive strategies, whereas more volunteer-intensive strategies might better suit an altruistic movement.
Your post is yeoman’s work and much appreciated.
There were a few areas where your reading of history seems to differ from mine, as well as a bunch of key distinctions that I believe should have made it in a piece of this length.
First, I think the piece gives too much credit to and puts too much focus on Hayek as an intellectual architect of neoliberalism. Hayek’s work was influential, and his impact on Fisher as well, but I don’t think Hayek is treated as a blueprint for neoliberalism.
The significant focus on Hayek is coupled with a lack of focus on the key philosophical and methdological distinctions, and actual successes and failures.
Philosophical and methodological distinctions
Neoliberalism isn’t a school of economics. There were several fairly distinct schools of economics that can broadly be classified as neoliberal. The tradition that Hayek was part of was the Austrian school. The Austrian school has a vibrant community (that has flourished online) but it is a fairly small minority of economists. And it has pretty significant methodological differences with mainstream economics, mostly in terms of rejecting some of mainstream economics’ efforts at quantification. Notably, Austrians also have a different way of looking at money than monetarism. With that said, Hayek’s branch of the Austrian school has embraced many parts of mainstream economics.
And then there are the schools of economics that broadly fall under “neoclassical economics” such as the Chicago School, which uses a pretty large amount of quantification and uses price theory (inherently quantitative) as its base. Although Hayek did interact with a lot of the Chicago School and contributed somewhat to its thought, he isn’t one of its central figures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_of_economics#Scholars (the last few predate Hayek). Unlike the Austrian school, the Chicago School has had a lot of success in getting mainstream recognition. The Chicago School is probably a key part of neoliberalism as people refer to the term but, with the exception of a couple people (mostly Milton Friedman) had little by way of explicit links with the intellectual activist movement to champion neoliberalism.
And then there are a bunch of other schools of thought like New Keynesianism that can also be broadly considered neoliberal (examples of New Keynesian include Greg Mankiw, former George Bush adviser) but a sort-of continuation of the old Keynesianism.
Related to these fairly distinct (and separately motivated and originated) schools of thought are the different political philosophies that get bunched as neoliberalism. Probably the most distinctive (and most minority) philosophy is modern libertarianism. This political philosophy and the associated intellectual infrastructure is what can be traced most closely to the sort of deliberate efforts you allude to (Hayek, Fisher, etc.) though a number of other key figures also show up (such as Austrian economist and radical anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard, explainer Walter Reed, and billionaire backers the Koch brothers). Libertarianism, which focuses on both economic and “social” freedom, has had important success and spillovers even if it hasn’t caught on as a philosophy (things like opposition to conscription, a direct success, and opposition to the War on Drugs, one that would penetrate mainstream liberal views soon). And then there are also other non-libertarian but market-friendly liberal and market-friendly conservative think tanks and institutes that have flourished in recent decades.
Overall, I would say that the growth of “neoliberalism” has involved some good initial planning by key figures but resembles a Hayekian spontaneous order more than the execution of Hayek’s central plan.
Actual successes and failures
The article makes neoliberalism appear like a huge success. Many of the leading proponents of various schools of neoliberalism take a fairly different view. For instance, when Hayek wrote “A Road to Serfdom” the non-war US federal welfare state was fairly small. Then in the 1960s welfare was expanded significantly. In the 1970s there were huge amounts of additional regulation that (depending on the school) could be treated as big negatives. Reaganism dialed back some of the changes, but without fundamentally changing them, just dialing them down in quantity. In the United States, according to various measures, economic freedom has been flat or declined somewhat rather than moving steadily toward more freedom. (Globally, economic freedom measured by various indices has increased mostly as communist regimes have ended and some big economies like China and India moved in a pro-market direction).
This had a large influence on how I view the strategy of community building for EA.
Could it be possible that neoliberalism was just a more correct model of how the world works, rather than an example of effective movement building?
There are lots of cases of correct models failing to take off for lack of good strategy. The doctor who realized that handwashing prevented infection let his students write up the idea instead of doing it himself, with the result that his colleagues didn’t understand the idea properly and didn’t take it seriously (even in the face of much lower mortality in his hospital ward). He got laid off, took to writing vitriolic letters to people who hadn’t believed him, and died in disgrace in an insane asylum.
That’s a horrible story!
Otoh, a few decades later handwashing did become mainstream. So I’d think that correct and clearly useful models have a great advantage in becoming adopted eventually. Good strategy/movement building is more relevant for hastening the rate of adoption.
To take another example: Communism profited from extremely good strategy/movement building at the beginning (Engels being one of the first EtGlers ever). But it ultimately failed to become widely accepted because it brought about bad consequences. Admittedly, it’s still pretty popular, probably because it appeals to human intuitions (such as anti-market bias, etc.)
Really enjoyed and appreciated this wonderful piece of analysis. Thank you!
Considering this post was written 7 years ago, I’m wondering if some of the insights you made have not been fully exploited by the EA community.
EAs do some of the vital things you identify extremely well. One of them is intellectual rigour, which fits with the academic angle that neoliberalism exploited. In an argument between an EA and a non-EA, you typically feel that the more intelligent and critical the audience, the better the chance that the EA will win, because we really test arguments to the nth degree. This is great.
One where we do less well maybe the the Utopian aspect. I believe that this may be because we do not necessarily recognise the importance of making our message “visionary” in a way that resonates with the general public. EAs are sometimes perceived as a group of nerdy, elitist intellectuals, which is not the reality. But it may be true that we allow this image to exist by not proactively changing it.
The tragedy of this is: EAs do have a very aspirational world-vision—a world without poverty or malaria or nuclear war or pandemics or animal suffering or existential AI risks … maybe we just don’t talk about it enough. Maybe in addition to all the critical, quantitative arguments and focus on the risks and the problems, we should have more “I have a dream” type communication, talking about the kind of world EA’s would create, using positive language (not “no poverty” but “everyone has a good standard of life and access to good education and health-care”; not “no animal suffering in factory farms” but “we have access to as much nutritious, delicious food as we want, while animals roam the fields in freedom with no worries about being slaughtered for our food.” … well, we can find better words …).
It could be that we do this already and I’m just not seeing it (I’m in Belgium!) - but when I see the press-coverage of EA during the SBF trial, it was so negative and so divorced from the reality that I actually see in the EA community.
A possible counter-argument to this strategy is that neoliberalism appeals to people with power (businesses with $$ that don’t want to get regulated). Very interesting read though!
“This is something the EA community has done well at, although we have tended to focus on talent that current EA organization might wish to hire. It may make sense for us to focus on developing intellectual talent as well.”
Definitely!! Are there any EA essay contests or similar? More generally, I’ve been wondering recently if there are many efforts to spread EA among people under the age of majority. The only example I know of is SPARC.